Note: There are some Shaun of the Dead spoilers below. Nothing major, but if you haven't seen the movie and plan to, you may want to skip this review.

I watched Shaun of the Dead Sunday night.

Now here's the deal when it comes to me and zombie movies. I have this thing about stories that involve the end of the world and zombie movies often involve just that. My problem with these stories is that they make me terribly depressed. The thought of the human race being wiped out is something that always gets to me, that sits heavily in my head and writhes under my skin. Whenever I see a solid presentation of the end of the human race, it always greatly disturbs me. The zombie movie that best did this to me (and there are, by the way, many zombie movies I haven't seen) is 28 Days Later. I love the movie, I own the DVD, I thought it magnificent, but it also greatly depressed me. It left me bleak and hollow, horribly sad.

I always hate the thought of humanity being wiped out. I suppose this would seem obvious, but the human race being eliminated or having the vast majority of humans being killed is a scenario that disturbs me to no end. It tends to leave me quiet and contemplative, thinking about our downfall. It always causes me to consider the possibility that at some point in the future, we may very well succumb to just such an extinction. It would almost surely be after I was dead and gone, but I find it unnerving, nonetheless.

Shaun of the Dead, however, treats this subject with quite a bit of humor and irreverence and the specter of the end of the human race is never very pronounced in the movie, despite the fact that it is a real threat. There's no doubt that this is a comedy, first and foremost, even though the zombies are not defanged, so to speak. In fact, the movie works wonderfully because it is willing to act as a comedy without completely giving up drama and horror. While it starts out--and largely remains--a very funny film, it does not shy away from blood and guts, from death and scenes that hold real emotional resonance, and from some fairly creepy zombies. They shuffle and they moan and can be comical at times, but they also walk around with bloody mouths and eyes, gruesomely eat humans and are in no way unwilling to randomly kill people in terrible ways.